Slash and burn

‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and prying in their glasse, like Apes.’

In her new book, Fashion and Fiction, Courtauld professor Aileen Ribeiro shows, by interpreting a gallery of arresting portraits backed up by contemporary literature, that clothes were a consuming, costly passion — a social index, suitor’s shorthand and poet’s primer. Ribeiro has spent decades mapping out Europe, not through its architecture, food or politics but what it wore: to move, court, make love, mock its rivals, strut, flaunt artistic patronage, keep warm, rob shops — or die. For those whose best notion of how our ancestors looked leans heavily on BBC wig departments or 1940s Hollywood swashbucklers, this gripping book is an automatic classic.

By the late 17th century, textile trade accounted for half England’s exports. Moreover, according to the 1688 Annuall Consumption of Apparell, a quarter of household expenditure went on clothes. Difficult to imagine today, however profligate our personal taste; yet it explains the prominence that writers and painters gave, in plays, pamphlets, poetry and those fledgling rags, The Tatler and The Spectator, to male and female subjects’ appearance. Vast amounts of money were disbursed by both sexes and all ranks. A suit worn by Charles I in 1629 cost £266; the Mytens portrait that records it was a snip at £66. And Old Bailey records from 1674 show the theft of clothing as the largest category of crime.

Men frequently laid out most — Samuel Pepys spent much more on himself than on his wife, asserting the need to be well-dressed: ‘I must go handsomely, whatever it costs me.’